THE TAXI GAME (part one)
Jann Burner
August 05, 2006
"Life is easy when you've got new tread."
In San Francisco, on the West coast of America in the state of California, there used to be a group of individuals called taxi drivers. For a very small fee they would be with you in their vehicle. They would transport you wherever you wished to go. They would talk, they would listen, they would even carry your baggage. In those days most of these people were writers, poets, old hippies, recovering substance abusers, out of work musicians or recent immigrants to this wonderful land. Dreamers one and all, the best and often some of the brightest fruit left unpicked upon the societal tree, turning slowly to sugar and threatening to rot and stain the ground.
In those days, an urban taxi driver made more life and death decisions than a $150,000 per year airline pilot, and yet he flew alone and got paid little more than the allowable minimum. He received no raises, no retirement, no medical coverage, nor even any workman's compensation and was treated by public and private citizen alike as a felon on parole. In those long ago days the taxi driver was, at one and the same time, victim and potential threat. He was often abused, verbally and sometimes physically, by passengers, fellow drivers, the police and passing strangers in the grip of a bad day. He received no ego strokes behind the wheel. Any satisfaction from the job he received had to be generated from within. He was in the truest sense, an urban bracero, a fisher of men on mean streets wearing a coat of many cars.
I used to be one of these men. I drove a taxi cab on the night shift in San Francisco. I drove first for Sunshine Cab and then Veterans and finally Yellow Cab. I drove over 3,000 ten hour shifts behind the wheel of absolute reality. All I might add, without getting wrecked or robbed. This was back during the Golden Years of taxi driving between 1975 through 1985. Rent was cheap and one could cover expenses with a good weekend.
During my years behind the wheel, the taxi cab became my office. I sat in there for eight to ten hours per night. I had conversations (sometimes quite intimate) with strangers while the backdrop of one of the world's most beautiful cities slid by outside. These strangers would then bid me goodbye and place money in my hand.
Driving a taxi, I often found that after about six hours in the driver's seat a strange phenomena would begin to occur. It was as if I was sitting at home perfectly still, and a holographic projection of The City was flowing around me. No sense of movement, totally centered, no sense of motion or even thought. The closest most people ever come to this clear zone, is when they are about to become involved in an accident. At such times that moment of clarity, the "center point" is often reported, just before the crash.
Emotionally, I found taxi driving to be neutral. It wasn't oppressive like I imagine working in a factory or a bank might be and it wasn't so thrilling that one would want to devote their free time and energy to it. It was…as the Buddhists might say…a left handed sort of a job. It allowed me to support myself and yet it really didn't interfere with my life. It left me--free. It left me enough time and energy to pursue the real interests in my life. With energy and curiosity and persistence, I found that it was quite possible to develop an entire bouquet of other interests.
Driving a taxi, for me in San Francisco, was an ongoing experiment in self discovery. It was an eccentric job that offered very wide perimeters. It gave me lots of leeway. It gave me the freedom to re-invent, re-imagine (or destroy!) myself every day. I spend perhaps sixty seconds with an authority figure receiving the waybill and small metal taxi medallion like some sort of unholy communion wafer, and then I was out on the streets, on my own--FREE! No boss, no supervisor, no one to tell me what to do. If I didn't want to work, I didn't have to. But this also meant that no one cared what I did. It was a two edged sword. I could end up drunk every day…behind in my rent, and suffering terribly from the lack of ego-stroking that goes on in most normal lines of employment. In order to survive and thrive in this sort of work environment, I had to have a very well defined sense of "who" I was. For self originating sorts of individuals who had more need of freedom than money and position, the art of Vehicular Tai Chi as practiced by driving a taxi could be very worthwhile.
The whirring of the tires on the late night asphalt, the blur of pedestrian faces through the glass induced in me a blissful vacancy of mind that has no real equivalent in civilian life. For me, driving cab was part martial arts, part meditative practice and part graduate school, sort of a graduate school of mind. It satisfied my voyeuristic impulses, fed my reclusive nature and inspired me to look deeply into the "why" of all things.
During my years of focused concentration behind the wheel I became a practitioner of what I call Motor Zen. Taxi driving very closely approximated the formal practice of Zazen. The driver had his seat cushion, his formal sitting position and in place of the white meditation screen he had the white city backdrop and instead of a Zen koan he had the mindless chatter from the rear seat and the endless circuits around and around the city…for ten hours at a time, looking for meaning. "Why am I doing this?"
But unlike ashram Zen, Motor-Zen carried some serious risks. The price for inattention was often severe. Sometimes it resulted in the destruction of the vehicle within which the body resided. Sometimes it resulted in the destruction of the body itself. No mere swat of a stick over the shoulders as in the Zendo. And the "Makyo" encountered in the safety of the meditation hall was nothing compared to the phantoms encountered out on the street behind the wheel of the speeding metal sled and in the back seat, not to mention those found in the deepest recesses of the mind after a late night shift when the questor lay curled alone in a cold metal bed, in a small rented room in a cheap hotel, wondering…
Often in the taxi, I was privy to deep discussions and questioning. Over the years the most recurrent theme either stated directly or implied was simply:
"Why am I here? (in this life, in this body, at this time). What is it that I am supposed to be doing?"
Be they doctor, lawyer or Indian chief the general consensus seemed to be that "that" (whatever that was), was not what they were really supposed to be doing. Seems we are all spear carriers in someone else's opera. All except for me, at that time I was The Driver. For that period of my life I seemed to have a back-stage pass.
From picking up people night after night I came to notice a growing restlessness in the population, a spiritual uneasiness. It was as if we were all waiting for something to happen, waiting for the weather to change.
I contend that the mechanism of consciousness is not fully understood. I believe that the brain, the Mind and the Spirit may have some surprise in store for us yet. But then, what did I know? I was just a cab driver. My thoughts often became entangled in my mind's hair like stale gum. After all is said and done, what are we anyway, except fictional creatures--figments, traces of spark and color from The Great Imagining in search of a worthy story.
(End of Part One)
In San Francisco, on the West coast of America in the state of California, there used to be a group of individuals called taxi drivers. For a very small fee they would be with you in their vehicle. They would transport you wherever you wished to go. They would talk, they would listen, they would even carry your baggage. In those days most of these people were writers, poets, old hippies, recovering substance abusers, out of work musicians or recent immigrants to this wonderful land. Dreamers one and all, the best and often some of the brightest fruit left unpicked upon the societal tree, turning slowly to sugar and threatening to rot and stain the ground.
In those days, an urban taxi driver made more life and death decisions than a $150,000 per year airline pilot, and yet he flew alone and got paid little more than the allowable minimum. He received no raises, no retirement, no medical coverage, nor even any workman's compensation and was treated by public and private citizen alike as a felon on parole. In those long ago days the taxi driver was, at one and the same time, victim and potential threat. He was often abused, verbally and sometimes physically, by passengers, fellow drivers, the police and passing strangers in the grip of a bad day. He received no ego strokes behind the wheel. Any satisfaction from the job he received had to be generated from within. He was in the truest sense, an urban bracero, a fisher of men on mean streets wearing a coat of many cars.
I used to be one of these men. I drove a taxi cab on the night shift in San Francisco. I drove first for Sunshine Cab and then Veterans and finally Yellow Cab. I drove over 3,000 ten hour shifts behind the wheel of absolute reality. All I might add, without getting wrecked or robbed. This was back during the Golden Years of taxi driving between 1975 through 1985. Rent was cheap and one could cover expenses with a good weekend.
During my years behind the wheel, the taxi cab became my office. I sat in there for eight to ten hours per night. I had conversations (sometimes quite intimate) with strangers while the backdrop of one of the world's most beautiful cities slid by outside. These strangers would then bid me goodbye and place money in my hand.
Driving a taxi, I often found that after about six hours in the driver's seat a strange phenomena would begin to occur. It was as if I was sitting at home perfectly still, and a holographic projection of The City was flowing around me. No sense of movement, totally centered, no sense of motion or even thought. The closest most people ever come to this clear zone, is when they are about to become involved in an accident. At such times that moment of clarity, the "center point" is often reported, just before the crash.
Emotionally, I found taxi driving to be neutral. It wasn't oppressive like I imagine working in a factory or a bank might be and it wasn't so thrilling that one would want to devote their free time and energy to it. It was…as the Buddhists might say…a left handed sort of a job. It allowed me to support myself and yet it really didn't interfere with my life. It left me--free. It left me enough time and energy to pursue the real interests in my life. With energy and curiosity and persistence, I found that it was quite possible to develop an entire bouquet of other interests.
Driving a taxi, for me in San Francisco, was an ongoing experiment in self discovery. It was an eccentric job that offered very wide perimeters. It gave me lots of leeway. It gave me the freedom to re-invent, re-imagine (or destroy!) myself every day. I spend perhaps sixty seconds with an authority figure receiving the waybill and small metal taxi medallion like some sort of unholy communion wafer, and then I was out on the streets, on my own--FREE! No boss, no supervisor, no one to tell me what to do. If I didn't want to work, I didn't have to. But this also meant that no one cared what I did. It was a two edged sword. I could end up drunk every day…behind in my rent, and suffering terribly from the lack of ego-stroking that goes on in most normal lines of employment. In order to survive and thrive in this sort of work environment, I had to have a very well defined sense of "who" I was. For self originating sorts of individuals who had more need of freedom than money and position, the art of Vehicular Tai Chi as practiced by driving a taxi could be very worthwhile.
The whirring of the tires on the late night asphalt, the blur of pedestrian faces through the glass induced in me a blissful vacancy of mind that has no real equivalent in civilian life. For me, driving cab was part martial arts, part meditative practice and part graduate school, sort of a graduate school of mind. It satisfied my voyeuristic impulses, fed my reclusive nature and inspired me to look deeply into the "why" of all things.
During my years of focused concentration behind the wheel I became a practitioner of what I call Motor Zen. Taxi driving very closely approximated the formal practice of Zazen. The driver had his seat cushion, his formal sitting position and in place of the white meditation screen he had the white city backdrop and instead of a Zen koan he had the mindless chatter from the rear seat and the endless circuits around and around the city…for ten hours at a time, looking for meaning. "Why am I doing this?"
But unlike ashram Zen, Motor-Zen carried some serious risks. The price for inattention was often severe. Sometimes it resulted in the destruction of the vehicle within which the body resided. Sometimes it resulted in the destruction of the body itself. No mere swat of a stick over the shoulders as in the Zendo. And the "Makyo" encountered in the safety of the meditation hall was nothing compared to the phantoms encountered out on the street behind the wheel of the speeding metal sled and in the back seat, not to mention those found in the deepest recesses of the mind after a late night shift when the questor lay curled alone in a cold metal bed, in a small rented room in a cheap hotel, wondering…
Often in the taxi, I was privy to deep discussions and questioning. Over the years the most recurrent theme either stated directly or implied was simply:
"Why am I here? (in this life, in this body, at this time). What is it that I am supposed to be doing?"
Be they doctor, lawyer or Indian chief the general consensus seemed to be that "that" (whatever that was), was not what they were really supposed to be doing. Seems we are all spear carriers in someone else's opera. All except for me, at that time I was The Driver. For that period of my life I seemed to have a back-stage pass.
From picking up people night after night I came to notice a growing restlessness in the population, a spiritual uneasiness. It was as if we were all waiting for something to happen, waiting for the weather to change.
I contend that the mechanism of consciousness is not fully understood. I believe that the brain, the Mind and the Spirit may have some surprise in store for us yet. But then, what did I know? I was just a cab driver. My thoughts often became entangled in my mind's hair like stale gum. After all is said and done, what are we anyway, except fictional creatures--figments, traces of spark and color from The Great Imagining in search of a worthy story.
(End of Part One)
Print
Email
